Most organisations that claim to be navigating disruption are actually managing change. There is a meaningful difference. Disruption doesn’t give you time to manage it — it replaces the ground rules of your industry before your planning cycle has finished.
Mark Preston lived this. He spent fifteen years building expertise in the combustion-engine technology at the heart of Formula 1 — then watched the sport’s most important new entrant, Formula E, make that expertise structurally irrelevant. The question was whether to treat that as a threat or a starting line.
What this talk covers
This keynote draws directly on Mark’s transition from the F1 paddock — where he worked as an engineer at McLaren and co-founded Super Aguri — to Formula E, where he built and ran the DS Techeetah squad that claimed five World Championship titles in Formula E — a combination of Teams’ and Drivers’ Championships. That journey involved rebuilding technical assumptions from scratch, retraining teams whose entire expertise base had shifted, sourcing and integrating completely new technology partnerships, and competing effectively before the organisation was ready in any conventional sense.
The talk examines the leadership posture that technological disruption demands: when to defend your existing capability base and when to cannibalise it; how to maintain team performance and morale during a transition when no one knows what winning looks like yet; and how to build organisational learning speed as a competitive advantage rather than relying on accumulated expertise that may no longer apply.
A significant section addresses the talent problem at the heart of most disruptions: the people who got you here may not be the people who get you there, and the leadership challenge of managing that transition with integrity is one most transformation programmes underestimate entirely.
Who this is for
This talk is particularly relevant to organisations in industries undergoing technology-led structural change — automotive and mobility, energy transition, financial services, healthcare technology, and traditional media and publishing. It resonates with CEOs, transformation leaders, and senior teams who are responsible not just for navigating disruption but for taking people with them.
The Formula E context makes it uniquely applicable to any audience dealing with electrification, decarbonisation, or the shift from physical to digital product architectures — sectors where the disruption isn’t hypothetical and the timeline is compressed.
What audiences take away
A framework for categorising their organisation’s disruption exposure and the leadership response each type demands. A set of diagnostic questions about talent — specifically, how to assess whether the team you have is positioned for the next phase of the transition, and how to lead the conversation honestly when the answer is complicated. And a concrete model for maintaining competitive performance during the transition window, drawn from the specific conditions of building a championship-winning team in a new series where nobody had a head start.
Book this talk: Contact Mark via the enquiry form or through Champions Speakers Bureau. Available internationally. Can be tailored specifically to EV transition, energy sector, or technology disruption audiences.